In the previous section we spoke about the tremendous joy that is born in a Jew's heart from contemplating the oneness of Hashem and the fact that the Holy One dwells within him. Now the Alter Rebbe continues and brings the language of the verse on this theme.
"מי הוא זה אשר ערב את ליבו לגשת אלי נאום ה'" ("Who is this who has dared in his heart to approach Me, says Hashem") - on the face of it the verse sounds like a challenge: who could possibly approach? And the answer is: any Jew who wants to. It is enough that he decides to let the Holy One in, and the recognition of the Divine oneness is meant to awaken in his heart a great joy, in the joining of the nefesh habahamis (the animal soul) to the nefesh ha'Elokis (the Divine soul).
Two distinct points are packed into these words of the Alter Rebbe. We will begin with the first, and afterwards return to the second: dirah betachtonim, a dwelling place for G-d in the lower worlds.
"How beautiful is our heritage":
"ועל זה תיקנו ליתן שבח והודיה לשמו יתברך בכל בוקר" ("and therefore the Sages instituted that we offer praise and thanks to His blessed Name every morning") - very often a person says the morning prayers without paying attention to what he is saying, simply because that is what is printed there. But if we stop and think: every single morning we say "אשרינו מה טוב חלקנו ומה נעים גורלנו ומה יפה ירושתנו" ("how fortunate we are, how good is our portion, how pleasant is our lot, how beautiful is our heritage"). Every expression here is remarkably precise: "our portion," "our lot," "our heritage." These are not three ways of saying the same thing for the sake of poetic flourish, G-d forbid. The Sages of Israel who composed the text of the prayers weighed every single word. Here the Alter Rebbe is not coming to explain the difference between "our portion," "our lot" and "our heritage"; he puts the emphasis on the third expression: "how beautiful is our heritage."
What is an inheritance? Quite simply, a person who receives an inheritance rejoices in it. In fact, according to halacha, one who receives a large inheritance makes a blessing with G-d's Name and Kingship. And why is the joy so great? Because he did not labor for it at all and invested nothing in it, and suddenly it fell into his hands as a gift. Tell a person he has just inherited a million dollars, and he will not be able to contain himself from joy and from the sense of wealth.
And here, every morning a Jew says: "How fortunate we are... how beautiful is our heritage." What did we receive as an inheritance? The ability to connect with the Holy One in our very consciousness. This ability came to us as a gift, as an inheritance from our fathers: Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov were connected to the Creator of the world on the highest possible level, and they bequeathed to every single Jew the ability to connect to Elokus.
Avraham Avinu was the first Jew with whom Divine revelation came to expression, as it says, "And Hashem said to Avraham." He opened the dynasty of the Jewish people, and that is why every Jew says in his prayers "our G-d and the G-d of our fathers." Note the precision: we call only Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov "our fathers." Reuven, Shimon and Levi are called "the tribes," not "our fathers." Why? Because a father bequeaths everything that is his to his son, since the bond between them is an inner, essential bond.
And one of the rules of inheritance is that the level, the age or the understanding of the son makes no difference whatsoever. Even a day-old infant inherits: if he was born one day before his father passed away, G-d forbid, then by every rule of halacha he is the heir, and he need do nothing to earn it. So too with every Jew: even if he stands on the lowest level, a "day-old infant" in his understanding and in his spiritual standing, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov are his fathers, and they stood on the highest Divine level and bequeathed this capacity to him. And this is what a Jew declares every day, every morning.
"לאין קץ יש לנו לשמוח על ירושתנו שהנחילו לנו אבותינו הוא ייחוד השם האמיתי" ("we have boundless reason to rejoice over the heritage our fathers bequeathed to us, namely the true oneness of Hashem") - what is the inheritance that Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov left us? They gave us the capacity to recognize, to internalize and to grasp the oneness of Hashem.
Avraham Avinu arrived at this on his own: he searched and sought out who it is that conducts the whole of creation, contemplating the sun, the moon and the stars, until the Creator revealed Himself to him. One of the midrashim uses a striking expression: Avraham was wandering about, not knowing who runs the world, "until the owner of the palace looked out at him." A "birah" is a term for a great tower, a lofty mansion; and the moment the owner of the palace looked out at him, Avraham discovered the owner of the palace. The Creator revealed Himself to Avraham, and Avraham connected to that revelation.
This is what Avraham bequeathed to every single Jew, "אשר אפילו בארץ מתחת אין עוד מלבדו" ("that even here in the earth below there is nothing else besides Him") - although the Jew finds himself in the lowest world, in the lowest of places, he is to know that there is nothing else besides Him, that there is no reality other than the Divine reality, "וזוהי דירתו בתחתונים" ("and this is His dwelling place in the lower realms").
Dirah betachtonim:
Now that the phrase "and this is His dwelling place in the lower realms" has been mentioned, let us go back over the lines we have read and see that there are two points here:
The first point: the joy a person draws down upon himself - how happy he is that the King is within him and dwells inside him, and that he is close to Him.
The second point: the concept of dirah betachtonim.
What does dirah betachtonim mean? After all, the Holy One is everywhere, so what is lacking for Him? The source of the idea is in the Midrash: "The Holy One desired to have a dwelling place in the lower realms." Every single word in the language of the Sages is exact, including the word "desired." To understand the idea, let us take the two most significant words: "dwelling" and "in the lower realms." Their meaning is simple, and precisely because it is simple it is powerful. (The concept will be explained at length in chapter 36.)
What is a "dwelling"? What is the difference between how a person appears and behaves in the street and how he appears and behaves in his own private home? Take a king, for example: the verse says, "Your eyes shall behold the king in his beauty," and when the king goes out he must be seen in his beauty, so he dresses in royal garments and all the trappings of royalty. But even a king, who is never seen except in full splendor and majesty, when he is at home, in his own dwelling, in his private room, there he is as he actually is, perhaps even without clothing, alone with himself, in the fullest revelation. Every garment is a kind of covering and mask, and depending on where a person is going, that is the covering he puts on.
So a "dwelling" is the place where the one who lives there is present freely, with no covering and no garment at all. The Holy One is everywhere, but He is not everywhere in a revealed way: in most places He is present under one covering or another. And this is the Divine desire: to be in a "dwelling," that is, to have no covering upon Him, to be in the fullest revelation.
And where does He want that dwelling? Not in the upper worlds, which are the magnificent chambers inside the palace, but "בתחתונים" ("in the lower realms") - in this world, the lowest of the low, the physical, coarse, most lowly place, the place that is the very opposite of a revelation of Elokus. And the Holy One says: precisely in the lowest place of all, here is My dwelling.
And this is the avodah of a Jew: we are here in the lower realms, in a world that by its very nature conceals the Creator, and a Jew's purpose is to reveal Him. It is a game of hide and seek: the Creator hides Himself, and the Jew has to find Him.
There is a well known story about one of the great tzaddikim who saw a child crying and asked him why. The child answered: a few of us were playing hide and seek, and it was my turn to hide while the others had to look for me. I stayed in my hiding place ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, and when I came out I saw that they had all disappeared and were not looking for me at all. That is why I am crying.
The tzaddik took the words to heart, and when he came to his chassidim he said to them: know that this is exactly how it feels. Just as you look with pity at such a child, so the Holy One feels all the time. He has hidden Himself from us, and nobody is looking for Him. And He wants us to seek Him out, to reveal Him, to show that He is here in the fullest revelation. That, in essence, is the Divine desire.
This revelation can be accomplished in all sorts of ways: from the straightforward way, keeping mitzvos, learning, revealing and spreading, all the way to the fascinating approach that the Baal Shem Tov teaches.
The Baal Shem Tov explains the verse "From Hashem a man's footsteps are established": every place a person goes, and every single step he takes, is directed from Above; it is a Divine plan. A person thinks he is going here or there, and suddenly he discovers he took a wrong turn and ended up in an area he never intended; he was flying somewhere and the plane made an unscheduled stop. Over the course of a lifetime a person arrives at places he never dreamed of reaching, and he assumes he simply lost his way, and gets angry at everyone around him who, as it seems to him, caused the mistake.
And what does the Creator gain from a Jew wandering down some ordinary street, on some simple detour? Says the Baal Shem Tov: a Jew is a soul within a body, and within him is faith in the oneness of Hashem. The very fact that in his mind there is faith in the oneness of Hashem is itself a certain revelation of Elokus in the world, and the Creator wants that revelation to reach every single place.
In summary: in this section we learned that the verse "Who is this who has dared in his heart to approach Me" is open to any Jew who wants it. We looked at the wording of the prayer "how beautiful is our heritage," the joy in an inheritance we did not labor for, which is the true oneness of Hashem bequeathed to us by Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, who are called specifically "our fathers" because of the inner bond between father and son; and just as a day-old infant inherits without doing anything, so every Jew, on whatever level he stands, inherits the ability to connect to Elokus. We then took up the second point, dirah betachtonim: a "dwelling" is a place where the one who lives there is present without covering or garment, in the fullest revelation, and the Holy One desires such a dwelling specifically in the lowest and coarsest world. Hence the Jew's avodah to reveal the Creator who hides Himself, as in the parable of the child in the game of hide and seek, whether through keeping mitzvos, learning and spreading Yiddishkeit, or through the very fact of his traveling from place to place, since all his footsteps are established by Hashem, so that the revelation of faith in the oneness of Hashem should reach everywhere.
In the next section we will continue with the words of the Alter Rebbe in chapter 33, and his extensive explanation of dirah betachtonim we will study in chapter 36.